rth, intellect and influence were found on the side of the
persecuted Covenanters. I do not remember any other period in the
history of the Church of Christ, since the day when the women of Galilee
ministered of their substance to our Lord Himself, in which noble women
took such a noble part as did Lady Culross, Lady Jane Campbell, the
Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess of Athol, and other such ladies in that
eventful time. We had something not unlike it again in the ten years'
conflict that culminated in the Disruption; and in the social and
religious movements of our own day, women of rank and talent are not
found wanting. At the same time, I do not know where to find such a
cloud of witnesses for the faith of Christ from among the eminent women
of any one generation as Scotland can show in her ladies of the Covenant.

Lady Culross's name will always be held in tender honour in the innermost
circles of our best Scottish Christians, for the hand she had in that
wonderful outpouring of God's grace at the kirk of Shotts on that
Thanksgiving Monday in 1636. Under God, that Covenanters' Pentecost was
more due to Lady Culross than to any other human being. True, John
Livingstone preached the Thanksgiving Sermon, but it was through Lady
Culross's influence that he was got to preach it; and he preached it
after a night of prayer spent by Lady Culross and her companions, such
that we read of next day's sermon and its success as a matter of course.
I cannot venture to tell a heterogeneous audience the history of that
night they spent at Shotts with God. It is so unlike what we have ever
seen or heard of. There may be one or two of us here who have spent
whole nights in prayer at some crisis in our life, going from one promise
to another, when, in the Psalmist's words, the sorrows of death compassed
us, and the pains of hell gat hold upon us. And we, one or two of us,
may have had miracles from heaven forthwith performed upon us, fit to
match in a private way with the hand of God on the kirk of Shotts. But
even those of us who have such secrets between us and God, we, I fear,
never spent a whole Communion night, never shutting our eyes but to pray
for a baptism of spiritual blessing upon to-morrow's congregation. What
a mother in Israel was Lady Culross, with five hundred children born of
her travail in one day!

I have not found any of Lady Culross's letters to Samuel Rutherford, but
John Livingstone's literary executor